PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE

SOUND OF HISTORY
ELIZABETH EDWARDS
This article explores the nature of photographs as relational objects in the making and articulating of histories.
It argues that, in the contexts of indigenous and cross-cultural histories in Australia and elsewhere, photographs
have a relational quality, occupying the spaces between people and people and people and things. They are so-
cially salient objects and tactile, sensorially engaged objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and
cultural experience. As such, they operate not only at a visual level but become absorbed into other ways of telling
history. Photographs become not simply visual history but crucially, oral history, linked to sound, gesture and
relationships. [Key words: photography, social practices, senses, histories, indigenous Australians]

This article proposes an overview of a growing
recognition of the importance of the material and sen-
sory in the communicative power of photographs.1 My
objectives are methodological—to explore the way
in which photographs operate as objects in the tell-
ing of history,2 occupying the spaces between people
and people, and people and things. My focus will be
the way in which sensory modes beyond the merely
visual are integral to the constitution of photographic
meaning and usage. In keeping with the themes of this
special issue, I shall explore this through photographic
meaning and usage as they pertain to Australian Ab-
original communities. At the same time, however, I
will be concerned with broader methodological issues
which, one hopes, might have wider application. I
shall be drawing largely, but not exclusively, on the
recent writing on the subject in Australian contexts,
namely Roslyn Poignant’s work with Axel Poignant’s
1952 photographs at Maningrida, Arnhem Land (1992,
1996), Benjamin Smith’s study of the Aboriginal com-
munity at Coen, Queensland (2003), and Gaynor Mac-
donald’s study of Wiradjuri/Koori use of photographs
(2003), as well as the works of scholars such as Michael
Aird (1993, 2003) and Jo-Anne Dreissens (2003). My
intention is to pull some of these ideas together and
explore them in the contexts of visual anthropology
and its methodologies.
The central tenet of my argument is that photo-
graphs are not merely images but social objects, and
that the power of those social objects is integrally en-
tangled with the nature of photography itself (Edwards
1999, 2003; Edwards and Hart 2004; Wright 2004).
Following Miller (1998:9), I shall argue that it is only
by engaging with the mundane and taken-for-granted
that we can see what photographs actually do in social
terms. My argument also draws on Gell’s suggestion
that “action-centered” approaches to material are more
“anthropological” because they place objects in a “prac-
tical mediatory role...in the social process” (1998:6).
Thus, rather than seeing photography as an abstract
formation or a solely instrumental practice (e.g., Tagg
1988), such a strategy places photographs as image-
objects in sets of relationships in which they are made
meaningful through different forms of apprehension.
Materiality is central to this because, I shall argue, it is
the fusion and performative interaction of image and
materiality that gives a sensory and embodied access to
photographs. This places photographs in subjectivities
and emotional registers that cannot be reduced to the
visual apprehension of an image, and positions them
strongly as what I shall term “relational objects.”
The shift toward a more evocative and experien-
tial anthropology, and thus the possibility of sensory
knowledge, is a concern which has inflected visual
anthropology for some time. This shift acknowledges
“the plurality of modes of experience and cognition
by which we may both visualize theory and theorize
visuality” (Taylor 1994:xiii), while Taussig argues
the necessity of rethinking the term “vision” in rela-
tion to other sensory modalities (1993:26). It is pre-

Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 21, Issues 1 and 2, pages 27-46, ISSN 1053-7147, online ISSN 1548-7458. ©2006 by the
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VAR_21.indd 27 2/13/06 11:28:42 AM

 cisely from this concern with performative embodi-
ment within the everyday usage of images that Pin-
ney has developed the term “corpothetics” as “the
sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement
that most people…have with artworks” (2001:158),
and Stafford has drawn attention to the way in which
the Saussurean “linguistic turn” of textualism, which
has impacted on photographic theory, has “emptied
the mind of its body, obliterating the interdependence
of physiological functions and thinking” (1997:5). In
a similarly framed argument relating to embodiment
of experience, Csordas has argued that the dominance
of semiotics—and hence concern with the problem of
representation over the problem of being-in-the-world
is evident in the relation between the parallel distinc-
tion between “language” and “experience” (Csordas
1994:11). Indeed, the relationship with disembodied
“history” as opposed to an “experienced past,” might be
similarly characterized. Drawing on such ideas, I shall
argue that in the engagement with history, photographs
are tactile, sensory things that exist in time and space,
and thus in embodied cultural experience. As I have
suggested, Western notions of occularcentrism and the
primacy of the visual in thinking about photographs
has elided the sensory and emotional impact of photo-
graphs as things that matter. I use the word “matter”
intentionally for it suggests the emotional and sensory.
As Miller has argued “importance” and “significance”
are distancing, analytical words, whereas “matter” “is
more likely to lead us to the concerns of those being
studied than those doing the studying” (1998:11). It
is a concern that becomes especially pertinent in an
Australian context, where family photographs and
snapshots have assumed a central role in articulating
suppressed, submerged, contested or fractured histo-
ries (e.g., Aird 2001). For instance, as Macdonald has
argued in her study of Wiradjuri use of historical and
family photographs, “The fact that valued Wiradjuri
photos are usually simply ‘snapshots,’ of the family
album type, is most probably what has contributed to
their underestimation in cultural terms” (2003:226).
Elizabeth Edwards is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London (LCC). She
was formerly Head of Photograph Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum and Lecturer in Visual Anthropology, ISCA,
University of Oxford. She has published extensively on the relationship between photography, anthropology and
history and is currently working on materiality and the social practices of photography and on photography and
historical consciousness in Britain.
28 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 28
Constructing photographs as relational objects is
particularly persuasive outside the confines of Western
photographic theory, which has dominated analysis
of photography, and more generally in anthropology.
“Dominant Western concerns of realism, subjectiv-
ity and individual and in Western modes of historical
truth, narrative and identity” (Edwards 2003:86), are
grounded in certain assumptions about the nature of
photography, often characterized in terms of death and
loss. Such assumptions have thus inflected the rela-
tionship between photography and history. While the
recognition of the link between the photograph and
“having-been-there” (Barthes 1977:44) is probably
universal, how people use that link in their own con-
structions and performances of history is culturally
inscribed at a very profound level (Poignant 1996:10).
Photographs are not only about loss,3 however, but,
about a grounded empowerment, repossession, renew-
al and contestation:
It was a beautiful day when the scales fell from
my eyes and I first encountered photographic sov-
ereignty. A beautiful day when I decided that I
would take responsibility to reinterpret images of
Native people. [Tsinhnahjinnie 1998:42]
Betty’s [McKenzie] collection is important not
only for the photos, but also for her memories of
the people in the photographs. It is the information
she attaches to these photographs that make them
an important historical record. [Aird 2003:31]
If, as visual anthropologists, we are to understand
the significance of photographs in the telling of his-
tory, it is necessary to destabilize those dominant theo-
ries and find other tools and methodologies that draw
on indigenous categories and practices of image use.
Such strategies belong to the broader move away from
the grand narratives toward the localized and partic-
ular, and from formalist models of analysis, such as
psychoanalysis to the study of practices on the ground
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 (Finnegan 1992:50–1). In recognizing this position,
we can find ways of thinking about the specifically cul-
tural and the culturally specific nature of photographs
that will open new theoretical and analytical spaces;
these do not necessarily have to answer to the rational-
ist, positivist or unproblematically evidential, in the
way that photographs have been linked to historical
documentation in the past. The material, relational and
sensory approach can open up the emotional and sub-
jective. There are, of course, a number of approaches
one might take to subjectivities—for instance, the
psychoanalytical. However, my approach owes more
to the phenonemological with its sense of “being-in-
the-world”, or Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” which
positions feeling not only in the interior subjective
space but in the space of everyday engagement with
the world (Bourdieu 1977:78–87; Ingold 2000:162,
169). As Jackson has argued, many of the leitmotifs
of anthropological analysis which have been used in
relation to the sociability of objects and that resonate
through my argument here—“practice, embodiment,
experience, agency, biography, reflexivity and narra-
tive”—are drawn from the phenomenological tradi-
tion of Husserl and Heidegger (Jackson 1996:vii). A
fluid sense of experience within the cultural allows an
experience of the past that is both constituted by and
constitutive of photographs. This is not only in terms
of discourses of representation, but, more particularly,
as a phenomenologically apprehended existence in the
physical world that gives equal weight to all modali-
ties in the immediacy of human experience (Jackson
1996:2). If, as Pinney has argued, the “concern for the
political consequences of photographs has effectively
eroded any engagement with its actual practice” (Pin-
ney 2003:14), then the material and sensory approach
implied within the “relational” moves us away from
the form of visual analysis in which photographs are
simply the result of abstract concepts vested in power
relations or semiotic codes. Instead, it allows us to
think about the complex and shifting relationships
through which photographs as experienced are cre-
ated and endowed with meaning and purpose (Dant
1999:124). Thus, photographs not only represent but
also evoke.
Images, in their many material forms, are active
objects with the whole range of sociality with which
other classes of material culture are now endowed (see
Appadurai 1986, Miller 1987 and 1998, Gosden and
Visual Anthropology Review Vo l u m e 2 1
VAR_21.indd 29
Marshall 1999, Edwards and Hart 2004). In this con-
text, photographs operate not only simply as visual his-
tory but are performed, I shall argue, as a form of oral
history, linked to sound, gesture and thus to the relation-
ships in which and through which these practices are
embedded. In many ways, this article picks up Paul
Stoller’s challenge that we require a “sensuous schol-
arship” that tacks between the sensual and the analyti-
cal, embodied form as well as disembodied logic and
academic analysis (1997:xiv). As such, it might be said
to explore photography beyond the visual: photogra-
phy whose social meanings are not necessarily dictat-
ed exclusively by the visual but also by their percep-
tion as objects through which the visual is performed
and understood.
Importantly, this way of thinking about photo-
graphs in relation to history strengthens their integral
position in constituting alternative histories, which
are embodied in objects, song, movement and bodies
(Stoller 1997:xvi). As Seremetakis has argued, “the
interpretation of and through the senses becomes a re-
covery of truth as a collective, material experience”
(1994:6). This resonates with what David MacDou-
gall has called “social aesthetics,” which reunites the
sensory, feeling and emotion with the cultural land-
scape (1999:3–4) and where “unconscious strata of
culture are built into social routines as bodily dispo-
sition” (Taussig 1993:25). Within such a framework
the understanding of the ways in which photographs
are made to tell history can be extended beyond the
visual in ways that heightens the understanding of the
visual itself.
ON THE SOCIALITY OF OBJECTS
It is necessary first to explore the materiality of
images as related to the nature of photographs then to
consider how this operates within sets of relationships
before finally extending these ideas to look at the re-
lationship between photographs, orality and sensory
registers of photographs beyond the visual. However
photographs are not merely a result of social relations
but active within them, maintaining, reproducing and
articulating shifting relations. This reflects the model
developed in actor network theory, in that we might
see photographs as “intermediaries,” or as Callon
writes, “something passing between actors which de-
fines the relationship between them” (Dant 1999:124).
Number 1 and 2 Spring/Fall 2005 29
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 Dobres has taken this further arguing that people expe-
rience their technologies as materially grounded are-
nas in which interactions of all sorts—social and ma-
terial—occur, constituting, shaping and being shaped
simultaneously through the social and cultural. This
is not simply in terms of the physical actions of ar-
tifact production and use, but “the unfolding of sen-
suous, engaged, mediated, meaningful and materially
grounded experience that makes individuals and col-
lectives comprehend and act in the world as they do”
(Dobres 2000:5).
The recent studies of Australian Aboriginal expe-
rience to which I am referring have all stressed the
relational and material qualities of photographs:
photos are material evidence of connectedness
to what is now “past”. The more photos connect,
the more they are valued. Photos are stories about
connections through time, affirming the exis-
tence and significance of the past in the present.
[Macdonald 2003:236]
But the relational qualities extend beyond the im-
age itself. The promise of recent material culture stud-
ies lies in the concern with the way in which “things”
are actually used by people and thus how their sensory
apprehension impacts on, and is impacted by, objects
(Myers 2001:5). Indeed, it is possible to argue that
photographs, like other classes of material object, “are
bundles of sensory properties which respond to specif-
ic sets of relationships and environments” (Edwards,
Gosden & Phillips, forthcoming).
While readings of photographs may, on the sur-
face, be a forensic extrapolation of content—“This is
my grandmother”; “This is the camp that was cleared
when I was a child”—the social systems of telling
histories into which images are absorbed are socially
grounded, embodied and expressed through subjective
relations with photographs (Figure 1). Thus, we need
to consider the network of relationships surrounding
particular photographs or groups of photographs in
interactive settings (Gell 1998:8). As Latour has ar-
gued, it is non-humans (photographs) as well as hu-
man actants that offer the possibility of durable social
cohesion (1991:103); indeed, given the indexicality of
photographs, there is a sense in which the non-human/
human divide is blurred, a point to which I shall return.
This impacts on the way photographs are used in tell-
30 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 30
Figure 1. Lena Djabbiba (right) looking at Axel
Poignant’s photographs, with her daughter Rachel
and granddaughter Stephenie. Maningrida 1992.
Photo © Roslyn Poignant.
ing history: Gell’s position echoes Tonkin’s suggestion
that, in order to “understand how history-as-lived is
connected to history-as-recorded, we have to look at
the actors concerned, who are living and developing
in times that also change”; indeed, memory might be
seen as “the site of the social practices that make us”
(1992:12). If photographs are central to the recupera-
tion of Aboriginal identities and histories (Taylor 1988;
Aird 2001, 2003; Dreissens 2003; Peterson 2003; and
Stanton 2003 to cite a few), they become central to the
relations inherent in those social practices.
Photographs as objects of history emerge from
multiple sets of relationships at many levels. Photo-
graphs as sets of relationships are, like all relation-
ships, subject to negotiation, exchange, trade and mul-
tiple performances and meanings. Not only are they
objects, produced through sets of social relations that
can be collected, exchanged through sets of relation-
ships. One should add here that this applies, of course,
not only to photographs active in the social relations of
the community but also those in “the archive”; indeed,
a number of the photographs discussed by Poignant
(1996) and Stanton (2003), for instance, involved pho-
tographs that have been moved back from the archive
to the community.4 Whatever the course and location
of images, the photographs’ very existence—what they
are—is embedded in a relationship that stays with the
photograph forever—that is, the relationship between
the subject and chemical trace of their existence that
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 is the photograph itself. That relationship is projected
into new spaces to perform within new relationships
in different contexts as the image is re-engaged with
repeatedly:5 “So now I have this new relationship with
any photographs that I view of Nancy Chambers who I
can confidently say is my great-grandmother” (Dries-
sens 2003:20). It is this powerful, original relationship
with the referent—“the trace of bodily connection”
(Wright 2004:76)—that inflects all other relationships
in which the photographs might become entangled.
Similar to Barthes’ argument on the indissoluble
relation between trace and referent (1984:6), Gell
has argued that the indexical trace, in making a rep-
resentation, literally binds the index “fixed or impris-
oned” to the prototype (referent). Thus, the agency of
the person impressed in the representation for which
Gell argues (1998:102) might be understood as the im-
pression of social being. Even images emerging out
of the profoundly asymmetrical power relations of the
colonial period might be understood in this way in that,
through tracing social being, such photographs carry
a humanizing potential that allows the possibility of
subjective experience (Edwards 2001:19). Reading
images against the grain like this creates a powerful
historical presence.
I have...often seen Aboriginal people look past
the stereotypical way in which their relatives
and ancestors have been portrayed, because they
are just happy to be able to see photographs of
people who played a part in their family history.
[Aird 2003:25]
Thus, clearly, relationships are contingent and
mediated rather than necessarily systematic, be-
cause they comprise a contradictory layering of at-
titudes, sentiments and ambitions, through which
photographs are both made and invested with value in
the contexts of both shared and contested meanings
(Edwards 2004).6 As Gell has argued, objects are “a
congealed residue of performance and agency in ob-
ject form, through which access to other persons can
be attained and via which, their agency can be com-
municated” (1998:68).
The relational approach to photographs ac-
cords with much current anthropological, and indeed
archaeological, thinking (Gell 1998; Dant 1999;
Dobres 2000; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Edwards,
Visual Anthropology Review Vo l u m e 2 1
VAR_21.indd 31
Gosden & Phillips, forthcoming). It stresses spaces
of relationships into which entities are placed—each
domain being represented through different sets of re-
lationships. What is important, for my argument here,
is that a relational position is intrinsically anti-essen-
tialist, because those relations are made up of multiple
intersections of intention, process and action. It is such
a position that allows the re-viewing and re-appropria-
tion of colonial images in Aboriginal historical frames
(Aird 2003:23–6; Smith 2003:12–17; MacDonald
2003:239) and thus moves away from dominant theo-
ries of photography.
The nature of photography is itself important
here. Photographs not only hold time and space, but
extend time and space through sets of multiple rela-
tionships, their piled-up significances, an aggregate
of relationships. I would argue that these sites of the
photograph’s ambiguity lend themselves to a relational
analysis, for the ways in which photographs exist with
their viewers and users are always, like relationships,
dynamic. Indeed, following Gell (1998), one can argue
that relational and performative theories of photogra-
phy stress analysis of the systems of production and
consumption, which moves photographs away from
western categories of evaluation. This applies equally
to assumptions about the relationship between photo-
graphs and history. For a material and relational ap-
proach to images allows a performative dimension that
is central to the telling of histories, a point to which I
shall return. The relational view is not simply different
people bringing different readings to images. Rather,
it is an engagement with the whole social dynamic
of photographs over space and time, in which photo-
graphs become entities acting and mediating between
peoples. The engagement with photographs as socially
salient objects both encapsulates and defines relations
between people.
As these considerations suggest, an important
concept in considering photographs as relational ob-
jects is as a form of extended personhood. Smith, fol-
lowing Gell, has convincingly argued this position in
an Aboriginal context (Smith 2003:11). Through their
indexicality and reproducible form, photographs can
be seen as “distributed objects” that initiate and act
in social relations (2003:11). Photographs are a form
of extended personhood in that they constitute a sum
of relations over time. In this “the effect of images is
not simply symbolic or the result of social relations”
Number 1 and 2 Spring/Fall 2005 31
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 but “can themselves imitate and act in social relations”
(2003:11). Engagements with photographs, linked to
the sensory—to which I shall be returning—blur the
distinctions between internal personal and external,
and relational in that “any social individual is the sum
of their relations distributed over biographical [or his-
torical] time” (Gell 1998:222). Photographs distrib-
ute personhood “beyond the body-boundary” (Gell
1998:104), the indexical trace functioning as a kind of
detachable part or exuvia.7
This is very important in relation to telling histo-
ries, for it is through the agency of photographs and
relations with photographs as objects that they are his-
torically enmeshed. They are, as Gell states:
not confined to particular spacio-temporal coor-
dinates, but consist of a spread of biographical
events and memories of events, and a dispersed
category of material objects. Traces and leavings,
Figure 2. Gordon Machbirrbirr with the “Die Bodies File”. Maningrida. 1992.
Photo © Roslyn Poignant.
32 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 32
which can be attributed to a person and which, in
aggregate, testify to agency and patienthood dur-
ing a biographical career which may, indeed, pro-
long itself long after biological death. [1998:222]
Photographs, in their social use, are created inten-
tionally to project a present past into the future and
as such they become intermediaries in networks of
use (Dant 1999:125). Continual re-engagement con-
firms and reaffirms “living presence,” even, as Gell
suggests, “long after biological death.” For instance,
“Cape York people speak of their old people, ‘looking
at us,’ from film and photographs” (Smith 2003:15),
while Poignant quotes Gordon Machbirrbirr, Burarra
photographer at the Maningrida Bilingual Literature
Production Centre (Figure 2), as saying,
It’s like a life coming to you. Like you have your
life coming back…I have never seen my ancestor,
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 but I would like to see them in the photo you know
and say “Ah yeah, this is my grandfather”...and
when you look at the photo and say ‘Aah’ and you
think that the spirit of that person came to life, and
lived. [1992:75]
Thus, “photos can constitute relatedness as a so-
cial fact. They can create a form of subjectivity, bring-
ing those distant in time and space into a present”
(MacDonald 2003:236). This process can also remove
photographs from assumed models of periodization.
As Donna Oxenham has commented, indigenous iden-
tities are not necessarily locked into the periodization
of past, present and future; rather, all three exist, like
photographs, in the here and now (personal communi-
cation, 2002). Smith, writing of the use of photographs
by the Aboriginal community at Coen, Cape York,
has stressed the way in which photographs fit into a
model by which people, things and land can all “ini-
Figure 3. Senior men studying photographs of ceremonies. From left Bündubandu, Tommy
Wagbara and Steohen Kawürlkku. Maningrida. 1992. Photo © Roslyn Poignant.
Visual Anthropology Review Vo l u m e 2 1
VAR_21.indd 33
tiate causal sequences and affect those persons who
come into contact with them” (Smith 2003:21)—that
is, the emphasis is on the relationships that photo-
graphs represent through their indexical traces, rather
than on individuals in their understandings of human
subjectivity and thus, history. Photographs are thus re-
lationships made visible: “the theme which came to
dominate almost every photo-viewing session [was]
the sense in which the photographs established con-
tinuities of self and families and made biographies
and genealogies visible” (Poignant 1992:74). Indeed,
people were identified in photographs through what
one might describe as a relational analysis: “identifi-
cations were made by noting the position one person
occupied in relation to another—even from their back
view” (1992:74). MacDonald extends this point: “The
genealogical memory is a memory of real people in
real time. Photos have the capacity to extend sociali-
ties which, in the Koori case, are primarily based on
Number 1 and 2 Spring/Fall 2005 33
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 face-to-face encounters”; also, “photos help to avoid
loneliness and keep alive contacts with people through
space and time” (2003:232).8 “They [photos] allow
people to become known” (2003:235–6). In other
words, they are used to confirm and perform the pho-
tographs’ relationships.
As I have suggested, the material manifestations
of photographs are central to the relational, for the
affective tone of photographs cannot be reduced sole-
ly to the power of the image, but the performance of
that image as a material object. As such, photographs
assume a form of agency in the way they prescribe
relations and the telling of history. The act of looking
at photographs is itself embedded in social relations
(Figure 3). Not only the restrictions of looking at
photographs of the deceased apply in some Aborigi-
nal communities, but equally so in relations with the
living. Further, these processes cannot be homog-
enized, but constitute complex and sometimes contra-
dictory contexts, within communities—as narratives
inflected with age, gender or lineage for instance, are
woven with and around photographs.
Poignant reports Jackie Nabuliya, a Maningrida
elder, explaining some of Axel Poignant’s photographs
in detail to his daughter. After doing so the photographs
were passed back away from the women and taken to
the other side of the yard by the young men of the
family, in accordance with the community’s complex
avoidance rules. She also notes, however, that there
was sometimes the quiet illicit pleasure of scrutinizing
a photograph of one’s tabooed kin (1992:73).9 Simi-
larly, Bell, working in the Purari Delta region of Pap-
ua New Guinea, describes how, at Koiriki, he handed
photographs first to male elders as protocol demand-
ed, after which they were passed down through the
hierarchy (2003:115). However, we must distinguish
between formal and informal acts of looking at photo-
graphs, and between public and private performance.
Each has its different verbal and embodied practices
and ways of scrutinizing the stories that emerge on
these differently understood occasions. What is impor-
tant here is that the experiential conditions of viewing
photographs are not neutral, but integral to the telling
of history.
As both Poignant and MacDonald have noted, the
use of photographs reflects and impacts upon changing
social practices concerning relationships in the treat-
ment of the dead. Many Australian Aboriginal societies
34 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 34
have prohibitions on speaking the names of dead kin
and, by extension, seeing a photograph of them (Mac-
donald 2003:236). Quoting Yasmine Mushharbash,
MacDonald reports that photographs of the deceased
at Yuendumu, northern Australia, were no longer
burned but held by people who were not close kin, for
a later viewing at an appropriate time. Likewise, Poi-
gnant reports that at Maringrida, photographs of the
recently dead were placed in “Die Bodies File,” an al-
bum that contains photographs from both personal and
community occasions.10 After the period of mourning
had elapsed, the bereaved could request prints so that
photographs could continue to function relationally in
the shared process of mourning (Poignant 1996:10).
Moreover Poignant states,
On one level it would seem that there is sometimes
a straightforward extension of the name avoidance
rule to include the image of a recently dead person.
On another level, however, the possession of a
photograph of a deceased relative not only serves
to hold the image of that person in the memory
but also provides a way of sharing the process of
mourning and/or recollection with others, within
a private domain, while avoiding the same senti-
ments verbally. [1992:73]
Here, we see complex relations between visual
and oral being worked out. This is so both literally, in
the somatic or kinetic relations with photographs as
the examples suggested, and metaphorically through
the relations that are engendered through the spaces
between peoples. But, within this, we have to consider
how material forms hold images in certain configu-
rations and bodily relations, giving cultural meaning
and concreteness to intentions. Material forms of pho-
tographs prescribe responses to them because they
demand specific bodily relations. These constitute
specific presences and co-presences in spaces which
“not only form an inescapable dimension of human
interactions but are also regulated by complex com-
municative conventions” concerning the way bodies
interact with one another in social space (Finnegan
2002:104).
Loose photos induce perhaps a freer narrative,
for albums structure time and space, retemporalize
and guide narratives (Edwards 1999; Langford 2001).
While loose prints and albums will generate multiple
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 histories, shifting on their access with each viewing,
the narrative structure of albums must be considered
as an active element in the replaying of those histories.
Albums also demand different physical and kinetic en-
gagements: they demand that the viewers gather around
one object, rather than pass single and successive ob-
jects from hand to hand, creating a differently inflected
social-spatial dynamic (Edwards and Hart 2004:11;
Bell 2003:115). Likewise, displays of photographs in
homes create landscapes of relationships and state-
ments of identity through the display and arrangement
of material objects (Wright 2004:80–1).11 As such, we
can see them “materially” located in a social world
which established their personal identity and cultural
legitimacy” which places them in a web of “meaning,
relatedness and history” (MacDonald 2003:230).
It is even more pressing to address these issues at
a time when the material and embodied experiences
of looking at images are changing radically with easy
access for many communities across the world via the
Web or CDs.12 The question remains, in time to what
extent will these technological changes impact upon
the way in which memory practices are constituted
and histories are recounted? The social act of gath-
ering around a computer screen to look at images is
Figure 4. Livingstone West with files of
markedly different from that of handling photographs,
photographs from the Berndt Museum. Kimberley,
touching them, stroking them and handing them to kin Western Australia. Photo © John Stanton
and to friends (Edwards 2003:90–1), or sitting alone courtesy of the Berndt Museum.
in quiet contemplation of an image held in the hand.
However, while digital images are often desired and
produced as material prints, one must not overlook the
fact that new ways of looking at photographs demand Indeed such a material form allowed community lead-
their own sets of embodied relations with a material ers to inspect material, assess it and control dissemina-
culture, as eyes run over the screen and fingers tap the tion as they deemed appropriate. This response cannot
keyboard, and bodies touch, clustered around the com- be reduced to a technical resistance. Surely, part of the
puter screen.13 One is making no judgment about the explanation is that the photographs as material objects
relative qualities of these very different social experi- offered a more “comfortable,” bodily engaged way of
ences, but the fact remains that they are different and telling histories with photographs. The different tech-
we must take account of them in considering the ways nologies and their material forms mediated the way in
in which photographs are understood. For instance, which the photographs, as social objects, participated
Stanton (2003:145) reports that there was resistance in social relations: they focused the act of looking, and
to the use of new technologies by older community thus telling, in certain ways.
members from Kimberley, Western Australia, in the Ownership of photographs, and access to photo-
community collaboration and visual repatriation un- graphs is an important material consideration.14 As
dertaken by the Berndt Museum as part of the Kim- MacDonald (2003:231) has demonstrated, photo-
berley Website Project. The elders were nonetheless graphs as objects of history telling move through a
keen to have albums of photographic prints (Figure 4), community as images are shown, exchanged, repro-
which could be held in the hands and perused quietly. duced and displayed. Likewise, Smith has suggested

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 the way in which the social contexts of ownership and
dissemination of visual records track the complex his-
torical relations, including blurring of the divide those
between whites and Aboriginal people (2003:14). But
ownership implies the possession of a material object
and thus social expectations are both attached to and
worked out through the material forms of images:
“There are many fights over photos, reflections of
communally understood breaches of rights or eti-
quettes, usually stemming from expectations of kin-
relatedness” (MacDonald 2003:231). Photographic
objects are entangled in a system of social rights,
obligations and values: “The value of an object is
relative in terms of its potential to influence and
determine the nature of various social outcomes”
(MacDonald 2000:96). This position would seem to
extend Deborah Poole’s well-known model of “visual
economy”, whereby photographs acquire meaning
and value through the social uses of photographic
objects and commodities: “It becomes clear that the
value of images is not limited to the worth they accrue
as representations seen (or consumed) by individual
viewers. Instead, images also accrue value through
the social processes of accumulation, possession,
circulation or exchange” (Poole 1997:11). As Mac-
Donald has argued in relation to Wiradjuri use of pho-
tographs, this places photographs and the telling of
history into a set of demands and expectations: “Pho-
tos are a form of capital whose value is determined
within the social relations of which the photo itself is
a part” (2003:231).
If preciousness of photographs in most commu-
nities is premised on the aura of the perceived direct
link with the past and the presence of the extended,
distributed person, the force of this can be understood
in relation to the social act of destroying photographs.
Not only is there the symbolic and actual violence of
tearing or burning the indexical trace, but, the de-
struction of photographs points to a breakdown or
secession of social relations. Macdonald reports that
in the Wiradjuri community, as in many places, it
was not unusual for new lovers to tear up the photo-
graphs of partners’ old lovers or cut them from the
image (2003:234), yet, at the same time they rarely
throw the photographs away (2003:227). Converse-
ly, photographs are often handled gently, with care
as if a living entity. Photographs here are extensions
of relationships:
36 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 36
we suffer...from forms of agency mediated via
images of ourselves, because as social persons,
we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but
in everything in our surroundings which bears
witness to our existence, our attributes, and our
agency. [Gell 1998:103]
This position again points to the way in which
we have to understand images not simply in visual but
in sensory relations in which they are enmeshed as
social objects.
PHOTOGRAPHS, ORALITY AND
SENSORY LANDSCAPES
Social relationships are, of course, based in com-
munication, “a working through of the resources of
our bodies and our environments” (Finnegan 2002:3).
In bringing material and relational thinking together
in our analysis of the way in which photographs are
experienced, “the force of such photographs can be
linked to the effects that images are able to manifest
on those who encounter them” (Smith 2003:11). We
must now extend this and look at the nature of that
effect. For photographs are the focus of intense emo-
tional engagement.15 As I have suggested, in premis-
ing of photographic effect on the visual and the foren-
sic alone, we not only limit our understanding both of
the idea of images as relational objects. We also limit
our understanding of the modes through which histo-
ries are transmitted and maintained. For photographs,
as will have become clear, both focus and extend the
verbal articulation of histories. If photographs both
extend the person and stand for relations between per-
sons—past, present and future—the oral, tactile and
haptic component of telling histories becomes crucial
here. It is to this that I now want to turn and consid-
er photographs as sensory objects and consider how
their operation within broader sensory worlds impacts
upon the social relations from which histories emerge.
I would argue that sensory engagement—handling,
touching, talking, and singing—is integral to the “idea
of personhood being spread around in time and space...
a component of innumerable cultural and institutional
practices” (Gell 1998:221).
A shift toward oral, tactile and embodied ways
of thinking through photographs is part of a broader
response to concern about the way in which margin-
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 alization of the senses which has resulted, objectified,
and textualized analyses of the body rather than a way
of being-in-the world, saturated with intentionality,
inter-subjectivity and existential immediacy (Csordas
1994:4,10; Howes 2003:29–32). This position is par-
alleled by recent concerns about the “decarnalization”
of objects and, the way in which the analysis of ma-
terial objects is often premised solely on the visual,
and its linguistic translation. As Pinney has argued
(2003:82), “the stress on the cultural inscription of
objects and images has erased any engagement with
materiality except in linguistic terms.” As I suggested
in my concern over the dominance of the semiotic,
discourse around objects—and certainly images—has
been inflected through textual metaphors of “read-
ing,” of the signs and symbols to be decoded. Indeed,
Stafford argues that “visual culture,” with its domi-
nant metaphors of “reading,” merely reproduces the
dominance of textualism (1997:5). This position re-
flects the values attached to Western understandings of
the hierarchy of the senses where seeing and hearing
stand for the production of rational knowledge—and
touch, smell and taste for the lower, “irrational” sen-
sory (Claessen 1997:405). Significantly, in the context
of Aboriginal histories considered here, Serematakis
has suggested the ways in which seductive imported or
imposed theories, such as visualism, can hide sensory
dispositions of the cultural periphery, suppressing sub-
jectivities—including the sensory—which are strug-
gling within world systems of discourse and knowl-
edge (1994:x). The arguments emerging from detailed
local ethnographies and collaborations such as that of
Smith and Macdonald—but more widely in the work,
for instance, of Brown and Peers in Canada (2005),
and Wright in Solomon Islands (2004)—is the poten-
tial for reinserting the emotional, visceral and affective
into our understanding of photographs—as Pinney has
argued, attending to the “praxis through which people
articulate their eyes and their bodies in relation to pic-
tures” (2001:168).
I am going to consider first the relationship be-
tween the visual and the oral. In the everyday use of
photographs as conduits of historical consciousness,
photographs are spoken about and spoken to—the
emotional impact articulated through forms of vocal-
ization. Just as there has come to be a greater aware-
ness of the interaction between oral and written forms
of history (Finnegan 1992:50), there is a sense in
Visual Anthropology Review Vo l u m e 2 1
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which we should consider photographs not only as
visual history but, as a form of oral history, and, by
extension, the way in which the oral constitutes an
embodied vocalisation.16 The oral penetrates all levels
of historical relations with photographs to the extent
that spoken and seen cease to be separate modalities.
Orality is not simply the verbalising of content, a play-
ing back of the forensic reading—“this is where we
had a fishing camp”—but the processes and styles in
which photographs have dynamic and shifting stories
woven around, and through, them, “imprinting them-
selves and being played back repeatedly through dif-
ferent tellings” (Edwards 2003:89). Photographs and
voice are integral to the performance of one another,
connecting, extending and integrating ways of telling
histories. As Poignant has reported of the response to
photographs at Maringrida, not only was the commu-
nity view that photographs were like bark paintings in
that they had stories (Poignant 1992:74) but,
Sometimes, an elder’s use of the photographs to
transmit his reflections of a past time and a way of
doing things to the young who had gathered around
took on the character of storytelling, so that the in-
tegration of photographs seemed no more than an
extension of traditional oral modes of represent-
ing the past. For others in the community, some
of whom were already involved in the integration
of traditional forms of visualising the past in pres-
ent-day recording systems, the introduction of the
photographs—an additional resource—sparked
notions of history that went beyond a genealogi-
cal patterning of history. [1996:8]
Photographs are therefore enmeshed in oral sto-
ries—personal, family and community histories.
They are performed through the spoken or sung hu-
man voice telling stories to an audience—formal or
informal. Martha Langford, in her interesting analysis
of Canadian photographic albums, has positioned se-
ries of photographs in terms of the oral in and around
them—the narratives they engender (2001:122–57).
Her analysis draws heavily on the work of Walter Ong
and, as such, she positions photographs within formal
definitions of oral literature. It thus shares the prob-
lems of Ong’s characterization of oral culture as overly
ahistorical, undymanic, totalized and technically de-
termined. However, her stress on the orality of photo-
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 graphs, the specificity of oral consciousness, and the
way in which “an album’s oral structure and interpre-
tive performance will bring us closer to understand-
ing the photographic work” (Langford 2001:122–3) is
pertinent, and instructive in the contexts we are con-
sidering here.
My argument here extends Langford’s notion of
the oral dimension of the photographs by placing oral
responses to them in the active sensory, experiential
reiterations of history-telling and in the social embed-
dedness of photographs, rather than in formal terms.
Contemporary Aboriginal communities should not, of
course, be characterized “oral societies” in the sense
that anthropologists and linguistic theorists have talk-
ed about them in the past. Rather Aboriginal societies,
on the whole, have a wide range of imaging and textu-
alizing powers and experiences across a multiplicity of
media, including the photographic and oral (Langton
1993:9), which makes such an analysis appropriate.
What is important here is the way in which the links
between the oral and the visual can counter and mesh
with other forms in a contemporary society, shifting
the balance and allowing “traditional” and multiple
forms of history transmission to operate.17
Yet this oral dimension is also highly regulated
and will inflect responses to photographs. This is
because the oral expression of photographs embeds
them in local structures. For instance, in traditional
Australian contexts speaking rights are carefully con-
trolled, knowledge itself being a form of property.
Violating those rights of speaking is a form of theft
(Michaels 1991:260). There are rights to stories and
histories and the control of photographs as objects is
integrally related to the social patterns of the transmis-
sion of knowledge.18 Thus, the articulation of stories
themselves, as an act of oral transmission and com-
munication, are inflected and constrained through sets
of relationships.
However vocalization and performance must not
be thought of simply in terms of “writable” words. If
the “gaze of Western thought” has ignored the mate-
rial, it has also ignored the dimension of sound (Stoller
1984:560). We need to see the oral expressions around
photographs in a more extended acoustical form, which
takes into account paralinguistic vocalizations such as
sobbing, laughing or the production of melody. These,
Finnegan argues, create the affective tone through
which photographs are apprehended:
38 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 38
Here is a subtle intermingling of individually-
sounded and -heard creations, of specific context,
and of patterns which are more or less enduring
and agreed with others. In its own capacity to
draw on auditory resources in thus versatile mix
of ways, human vocal interaction makes up a
remarkable, highly flexible and enormously far-
ranging human-created tool for sonic communica-
tion. [Finnegan 2002:80]
Indeed, it is, as Howes has argued a “curious fact
that anthropologists, for all their concern with language
and “discourse” rarely pay much attention to the medi-
um of speech, namely sound which is taken for grant-
ed” (2003:36). For if photographs are enmeshed in the
oral, they are also enmeshed in sound—the sound of
voices, spoken or sung, in rising and falling rhythms,
tones and volumes. Sound creates the environment for
viewing photographs and constitutes a social act in
that it reinforces sociality of objects and the relations
in which they are enmeshed and the sense of the social
self (Tacchi 1998:25–7). Feld has described the flow
of sound as: “the flow of poetic song paths, [which] is
emotionally and physically linked to the sensual flow
of the singing voice” as well as “a fusion of space and
time that joins lives and events as embodied memo-
ries” (1996:91). Further, as Ingold has argued, sound
communicates directly and immediately through hear-
ing. Hearing forms a porous boundary between the
external and the internal, which appeals directly to
“the ‘inwardness’ of life” (2000:245–7). But hearing
also implies listening, which is an engaged intentional
hearing (Carter 2004:44). Thus, one can argue that the
heard sound of the oral, listened to, draws the visual
apprehension of the photograph deeper into the world
of the perceivers and their social relations, reinforcing
and moulding the understanding of the photograph.
As performative objects, photographs create the
frame for patterns of telling, or reinforce extant ones,
reinforcing memory not simply through the image but
through the structure of repetitions—both the shape
of telling and the contests of telling. Sound utterance,
like the photographic moment is fugitive (Langford
2001:122), but repetition, the continual re-performance
of photographs within the oral dimension, ensures the
longevity of both. However, silence, the absence of
voice or sound, is equally significant. Forgetting and
loss are the silences or the non-functioning of the oral
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 around photographs. The power of this suggestion is
demonstrated in the way that photographs are often
described in oral metaphors. For example, an exhibi-
tion, Lost Identities: A Journey of Rediscovery (1999),
curated by Shirley Bruised Head of the Peigan Nation,
Canada,19 proclaimed on its website that “photographs
can speak, they can whisper or shout” but they are
also described as voiceless: “many photographs...are
silent. When individuals, events or other details are not
known, photographs do not have voices.” People were
asked to “find voices and stories buried in the pictures”
(Lost Identities 1999). Oral articulation, the naming of
names, invests tellers with a dynamic power over their
own history, breaking the silence (Langton 2001:122;
Driessens 2003), articulating the interaction of photo-
graphs and people in historical relations; hence the im-
portance of photographs in telling genealogies (Mac-
donald 2003:235–6) as photographs return or reinforce
the power to speak of one’s history.20
Oral expression demands the interaction of a spe-
cific audience at a specific time—that is it is lodged in
relationships, creating the contexts for the transmission
of stories. “Understanding...photographs is a process of
reaching out for what is finally absent, rather than grasp-
Figure 5. Namaluda, Nangulumin and children in a
ing the presence of new ‘truths’” (Lippard 1992:20). group, looking at contact sheets. Maningrida. 1992.
The narrated story allows the audience to respond (Ong Photo © Roslyn Poignant.
1982:42) as stories are woven around photographs
which are held, passed from hand to hand and caressed
or even among groups clustered around the computer sorbed and refigured in the present. They can “reunite
screen. These are not single voices of linear narrative communities which are fragmented by the disparities
but polyphonic, dialogic narrations in which the nar- in generational experience and knowledge” (Peers, per-
rator shifts from point to point, adopting appropriate sonal communication, 2005). Thus, the oral entangle-
modes, effecting responses from the audience (Brown ments of photographs render them truly multi-vocal.
and Peers 2005:230–1). The rhythms shift from As this suggests, orality does not exist outside the
straight narration to song, lamentation, and laugh- broader patterns and practices of embodiment.21 As
ter—all demanding different sets of responses from discussed earlier in the contexts of materiality, photo-
listeners. Responses are not necessarily ordered, but graphs are viewed in groups—bodies touching, a prox-
multi-layered and dynamic. Perhaps the sound is of emic sense of an interpreting community. As such,
more than one language, especially in situations where proximity is not only constituted through “presences
the younger generation does not necessarily have the and co-presences” (Finnegan 2002:104) to which I
local language. have referred, but also within that space (Figure 5).
Photographs allow people to articulate histories in Proximity brings into play nonverbal channels of com-
interactive social ways that would not have emerged munication—facial expression, gesture, even smell
in those particular figuration if photographs had not (Howes 1991:171)—all of which contribute to photo-
existed. Photographs become a form of interlocutor. graphic meaning in that they create environments for
They literally unlock memories and emerge in multiple the affective experience of images.
soundscapes, allowing the sounds to be heard and thus There is a strong tactile and haptic component in
enabling knowledge to be passed down, validated, ab- oral expression of photographs as persons must be in

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VAR_21.indd 39 2/13/06 11:28:54 AM

 the presence of one another to communicate. Touch is,
in many ways, the most intimate of the senses, for it
registers the body to the outside world. It is arguably the
touch on the photograph that mediates the presence of
the ancestor, confirming vision, in that touch and sight
are bridged to define the real (Ong 1982:168–9) as the
finger is run over the images. It creates what Taussig,
following Benjamin, terms “optical tactility”—“the
plane where the object world and the visual copy
merge”—fulfilling the desire to get hold of something
very closely (Taussig 1993:35). Touch gives solidity
to the impressions of the other senses (Jay 1993:35),
and connects people to things. Photographs are held,
caressed, stroked, sung to. In this sense the distributed
personhood invested in the photograph is made mate-
rial, in that the photograph, through its indexical trace,
becomes an extension of the person—the ancestor per-
formed through physical engagement. As MacDonald
records of her own response to watching and hearing
people respond to photographs, “I began...to see them
as real people rather than simply images” (2003:231).
As Finnegan has argued, touch itself is not dis-
connected to the telling of history: “Human memory
is extended and embodied through our tactile as well
as our visual or auditory experience. Something of a
Figure 6. Frank Gurrmanamana singing “singray”.
commemorative function can be performed through Maningrida. 1992. Photo: © Roslyn Poignant.
the handling of familiar objects…symbolic tactile
contact between humans through external artefacts is
yet another way in which human beings extend their
experience beyond the here and now into the longer a formal sign language,22 but the “spontaneous cre-
ranges of the past” (2002:213–4). If the tactile quali- ations of individual speakers” (McNeill 1992:1).23 I
ties of photographs, with their smooth surfaces and am marking it here only as the articulation of touch
delicate paper bases, are secondary to visual, they are and embodied responses to photographs. However, it
none the less highly significant in the transmission of is worth noting in our relational concerns here that, in
shared values and memories. As a number of commen- Aboriginal sign-language, kin and social interaction
tators have suggested, history and memory are em- is mediated through the body (Kendon 1988:330–68).
bodied and materialized (Fentriss and Wickham 1992; Gesture coexists with speech, in that we should “re-
Connerton 1989; Forty and Kuechler 1999). “Human gard the gesture and the spoken utterance as different
memory [and thus history] is extended and embodied sides of a single underlying mental process” (McNeill
through tactile as well as visual and auditory experi- 1992:1), closely intertwined with the oral in time,
ence” (Finnegan 2002:213). Not only are photographs meaning and function, and thus, the telling of histo-
touched, but they are enmeshed in a fluid continuum ry. Even small movements reinforce both voice and
of touch and gesture cohering groups of interlocu- image and thus narration, making it more vivid and
tors. Touching is one of the most expressive gestures revealing the speaker’s conception of the discourse
that both links the personal, idiosyncratic and con- (Finnegan 2002:111; McNeill 1992:217). While a
text specific to socially regulated aspects, and frames detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this paper,
the pragmatic content of the oral image, marking the and in any case requires specific ethnographic
story (McNeill 1992:2, 183). By gesture, I mean not grounding, it is essential that we see photographs as

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 embedded in gesture just as they are in oral expres-
sion. This link between body, gesture and historical
narration has, of course been widely recognized by
oral historians (for example Finnegan 1992:106–7;
Tonkin 1992:51–2), however, it is equally important
to recognize that the presence of the photograph will
elicit specific gestural and haptic forms which shape
the communication of history. Bell records how, in
Purari, photographs inspired women to demonstrate
dances, and men to pound the floor in the rhythm of
hand drums (2003:116).
The fact that touch and gesture become so impor-
tant in the unspoken relations with photographs can
be linked back to the nature of the photograph
and its indexical quality. It would seem to enhance
our argument for photographs as “distributed persons”,
and the way in which the communication with the
photograph/person at a subjective level cannot be eas-
ily disentangled.
Touch and gesture bring us back to relationships,
because they operate in the “immediate bodily pres-
ence of interacting participants” (Finnegan 2002:212).
This important point is demonstrated by Poignant’s
description of Frank Gurrmanamana, the principle
Anbarra owner of the Jambich Rom ceremony, sing-
ing a series of Jambich manikay songs (Figure 6).24
This he does in response to a series to Axel Poignant’s
photographs of the rom ceremony, and he does so by
matching the appropriate verse in the series of the im-
age. The verbal imagery of the songs mirrors the visual
imagery of the indexical trace of the rom pole motifs
(Poignant 1996:23). But the embodied interaction is
extended beyond the visual as Frank Gurrmanamana
uses the photographs themselves as clapping sticks to
accompany his singing (Poignant, personal communi-
cation, 2003), holding them in his hands, beating them
rhythmically with his fingers, recalling the sound of
the clapping stick and its significances. The experience
of the photographs, their meaning and impact cannot
be reduced merely to a visual response but, as I have
argued throughout this paper, must be understood as a
corpothetic engagement with photographs as bearers
of stories in which visual, sound, and touch merge.
As Seremetakis has argued, the sensory is not only
in the body but is external to it, and disperses into the
surfaces of things which themselves impact percep-
tual experience in a mutually sustaining relationship:
“the interpretation of and through the senses becomes
Visual Anthropology Review Vo l u m e 2 1
VAR_21.indd 41
a recovery of truth as a collective, material experi-
ence,” revealed through gesture, experience and per-
formance (1994:6). If touch is a defining characteristic
of vision in relation to the social use of photographs,
then, methodologically, there is no way in which we
can elide the material, and the sensory, in thinking
about photographs.
CONCLUSION
If “photography produces a set of objects, mean-
ings, and social relationships” (Smith 2003:22)
through which histories are articulated, we need to
look for fuller ways to understand their apprehension.
What I have argued for here is for a more sensory way
of thinking about photographs if we are to understand
their true impact in the making of histories. Stoller has
argued that “fully sensuous scholarship encompasses
reality, imagination and reason, difference and com-
monality fused and celebrated in both rigorous and
imaginative practices as well as in expository and
evocative expression” (1997:89). It is for this reason
that I have chosen to position photographs and histo-
ries in Stoller’s model of sensory scholarship rather
than more formalist models of for instance psycho-
logical and cognitive anthropology, psychoanalysis,
or psycho-dynamics. Such approaches require specific
ethnographies to be meaningful, rather than the broad
methodological sweep that has been my concern here.
My aim has been rather to consider, with an increas-
ing emphasis in visual anthropological research of the
practices and processes of visuality and photography
in many cultures, that maybe it is time to extend vi-
sual anthropology beyond the visual, and to explore
the ways in which visual practices, such as the use
of photographs, are integrally related to other sensory
forms through which the past is articulated.
Macdonald has argued that as photographs become
reproduced and performed in different contexts, the
value attributed to personal collections of photographs
diminishes and the power of keepers of memory shifts
(2003:241). This may be so, but, I would argue, only
up to a point. New forms, such as published books
and websites might constitute different performances
of those images and prescribe different embodied and
relational dynamics through their material perfor-
mances. However, there remains, even in the digital
age, an emotional desire to own photographs as mate-
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 rial objects. To hold them, display them, stroke them,
pass them around and tell stories whether those pho-
tographs are produced as analogue, printed in a book,
recorded as digital pseudo-photography, or pulled off
a website. We must see them as part of ongoing social
biographies of images that remain entangled with dy-
namic sets of sensory and social relations beyond and
in excess of the image itself.
NOTES
1 I am most grateful to my colleagues Chris Gos-
den, Laura Peers and Roslyn Poignant for discuss-
ing many aspects of this paper with me and for
their invaluable comments. I should also like to
thank colleagues from across the world who took
part in the Wenner-Gren Research Symposium on
material culture and the senses in Sintra, Portugal,
2003. Our stimulating discussions on that occa-
sion started me thinking in this direction. I should
also like to thank Roslyn Poignant and John Stanton
for kindly giving me permission to use their
photographs.
2 Throughout I am using “history” in the broadest
sense of engaging with and narrating pasts.
3 The role of photographs in addressing the sense
of trauma and loss of identity and histories of the
“Stolen Generation” in Australia has been of ma-
jor importance, especially in the wake of the 1997
report Bringing Them, Home. There have been a
number of important archival projects, for example,
that with the Kimberley community, Western Aus-
tralia (Stanton 2003) or those around the historical
collections of the Queensland Museum (Aird 1993).
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Tor-
res Strait Islander Studies in Canberra runs a fam-
ily history advice service for Aboriginal people
(see, http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/lbry/fmly-history/,
accessed October 26, 2004).
4 The material and sensory qualities of “the archive”
and its disruption of those qualities of photographs
as “ a massive exercise in dehistoricisation and
decontextualisation” (Hayes et al. 1988:6) is beyond
the scope of this paper. However, the practices of
archival arrangement and dissemination impact
upon community uses. (See Fourmile 1990; Edwards
2003; Sassoon 2004; and Brown and Peers 2005
for examples)
42 Vo l u m e 2 1 Number 1 and 2
VAR_21.indd 42
5 Significantly, in all the case studies from which I am
drawing, portraits, formal and informal, constitute
the main focus of attention.
6 Poignant has demonstrated the way in which a
commercially produced photograph of a group of
Aboriginal people taken in London inscribes Ab-
original relationships, as they stand according to
their kin groups and people, rather than—despite
appearances—a grouping arranged by the photog-
rapher (2003:58).
7 Batchen (2004:40) has made this point in the discus-
sion of Western practices and the 19th century pre-
dilection of placing photographs in conjunction with
other detachable parts of the body, especially hair.
8 Indeed, expressions of political empowerment have
been expressed through the photographic metaphor
of “reclaiming the shadows“ (Edwards 2003:84).
9 For instance, the avoidance by a young man of his
sister or a married man of his mother-in-law.
10 The album was kept at the Maningrida Bilingual Lit-
erature Production Centre by Gordon Machbirrbirr.
11 Bell records how in private viewings in the Pu-
rari region heirlooms were brought out and shown
alongside photographs, both merging into personal
histories (2003:115).
12 For the implications of this technological shift and
the values clustered around the scanned photograph
see Sassoon (2004).
13 I am grateful to Toby Wilkinson, with his deep un-
derstanding of digital technologies, for discussing
some of these ideas with me.
14 This again has impacted on archival practices, with
increasing demands for access and sometimes con-
trol over images in institutional environments (e.g.,
Powers 1996; Fourmile 1990; Edwards 2003; Brown
and Peers 2005).
15 The anthropology of the emotions is beyond the
scope of this paper although emotions are closely
related to the senses and their differentiation is cul-
turally and historically determined (see Howes 1991;
Claessen 1993, 1997). There is an extensive litera-
ture on emotion, (e.g., Lutz and White 1986; Lutz
and Abu-Lughod 1990; Leavitt 1996). Harkin (2003)
has recently argued the importance of recognizing
emotion as a modality in historical narrative. Given
the traumatic histories to which photographs allude
in an Aboriginal context, Harkin’s argument would
make a useful extension of the one presented here.
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2/13/06 11:28:56 AM
 16 My concern here is with the condition and process
of the oral—orality—rather than the specifics of lan-
guage itself.
17 The precise dynamics of this will, of course, vary
across different kinds of communities, whether “re-
mote” or “settled” (Langton 1993:11–13).
18 Isaac has explored ways in which access to photo-
graphs was controlled through the structures of tra-
ditional knowledge at Zuni, New Mexico (2002).
19 In collaboration with the Alberta Community Devel-
opment project.
20 “Giving voice” has also, of course, had a literal and
metaphorical meaning in reflexive anthropological
practices in recent years, including in visual anthro-
pology. (e.g., MacDougall 1998:93–122).
21 As Merleau-Ponty argued, “Embodiment is the ex-
istential condition of possibility for culture and self”
(Csordas 1994:12).
22 Kendon’s argument is that in formal Aboriginal sign
language not only is kin articulated in gesture and
sign by pointing to a part of the body, but that “The
body-articulated character of kin-signs appears to be
a reflection of how social interaction, within a given
relationship, is mediated by way of the body.” This,
in its turn, is reflected in language (1988:330–1).
23 There is an extensive literature on gesture (e.g., Mc-
Neill 1992; Kendon 1997). There are also formalised
sign languages; see for example, Kendon (1988). A
special issue of Visual Anthropology Review, “The
Third Eye: Deaf Visual Traditions” (1999–2000,
15:2) marks the established interests of visual an-
thropologists in gesture and sign.
24 Significantly, in the context of my argument here,
the Rom is a ceremony about making and consolidat-
ing friendly relationships and the sharing of special
knowledge (Poignant 1996:21).
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